Gallery Goes to WCLF: John FitzGerald, Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin & Annemarie Ní Churreáin

In Hymn to All the Restless Girls Annemarie Ní Churreáin continues to trace the personal in public tragedies and to transmute them into fiercely dramatic poetry. Celebrating the rebel spirit of the restless girl, sometimes known as a troublemaker but valued as a truth-teller, she offers prayers of defiance, sacraments of identification, howls of protest and lyric flights. Poems with the force of charms cast their gaze in all directions as they castigate the history of the Irish State (the ‘Free’ State) and the Catholic Church and find ways to thrive beyond cruel experience. Folklore, including superstitions, Irish words and the atmosphere of rural life imbue poems of empathy for the ‘girls in trouble, sinful girls, the fallen’ and emigrants forced to leave. Taking bearings from the ancient art of fiachairecht, the practice of looking to ravens for omens and prophecy, this is a handbook of care and healing and, ultimately, reclamation.

Among the remarkable characteristics of Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin’s poetry is its consistent excellence over nearly sixty years. Certain poems have entered the canon of Irish poetry. Her publishing career has been embellished with awards and honours at home and around the world. New Selected Poems represents generously each of her ten collections and culminates in a series of powerful new poems confirming that she is, simply, one of the finest poets at work today. New Selected Poems follows the success of Selected Poems (2008) and includes generous selections from, among others, The Sun-fish (2009, Winner of the Griffin International Prize for Poetry), The Mother House (2019), The Map of the World (2023) and new poems.

It is no surprise that John FitzGerald’s Long Distance reveals the deepening impression of a poet who is both chronicler of all that fades and passes and observer of ‘our giant reapers’ that harvest wind for ‘our new elixir’. In forms that range from sequences of sonnets to haiku he acknowledges and brings to life vividly worlds familiar and strange — what he calls ‘the remote and the ordinary’ — as he hovers somewhere between them. A schoolboy absorbs the effects of Seán Ó Riada’s cortège. There’s a translation of an early photograph and the ‘surround sound’ of a corncrake while settings reach from his home place in West Cork to Queensland, Australia, and a mountain in China’s Hunan province. ‘I have work to do / to keep it all as it is,’ he writes in resonant and remarkable poems cognizant that ‘a long note / from an angel’s throat once sung / can never be silenced’.

This event is supported by The Gallery Press